Synthetic biology and gene synthesis:George Church and his Harvard lab recently developed a new way to synthesize DNA. They are reducing costs for genetic synthesis with a reasonable accuracy. Right now the cost of synthesizing a base [using conventional technology] is about 10 cents. That's the current street price for raw oligonucleotides. For synthesizing simple genes, it's more like $1.30 a base. George Church and his team can manufacture oligonucleotides at .01 cent per base. It means many more genetic constructs can be made. The method also allows longer stretches of DNA to be made. The implications are that we are getting closer to being able to arbitrarily "program" the millions of base pairs in microbes or billions of base pairs in plants and animal genomes similar to the way that we program computers.